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About

Hian and Brian in Clarke Quai, Singapore I was born in Semarang in 1972. My parents and grandma were teachers, perhaps that's why I like teaching and writing articles/books very much. I have two brothers and two sisters, and I'm the youngest in the family.

My interest in IT grew when I enrolled to DOS and Lotus 123 class in LPK Sentral Informatika - Semarang when I was 15 years old . I managed to make a small application for my brother in Lotus 123 macro, then I was given a scholarship in LPK IKIN to study QuickBASIC. It was a pleasure time for me, trying to develop nice programs, including rewriting my previous macro with QuickBASIC. Although I didn't have computer at home, but I managed to practise using my schools' computer lab, because I worked as a volunteer assistant there.

When I was in my final year in High School, I learned dBASE III+ programming and it was terrific! I learned something new, you know, in QuickBASIC it was quite difficult to create database applications; but in dBASE III+, it was so different, very easy! Since then, I learned continually to improve my programming techniques by reading Alan Simpson's books. After graduated from High School, I worked as a part-time programmer using dBASE III+ as the development environment, and Clipper Summer 87 as the compiler when we proceduced the final version of the applications. It was my first experience with Clipper.

In 1991, I was attracted with FoxPro 1.01 and started to migrate to it. After exploring FoxPro for some time, I found out it was not for me and Clipper 5.0 was released. I bought it and read the manual books, wow, I couldn't understand anything about the new feature of Clipper 5.0! Lucky me, I found several excellent Clipper books in the market and finally I understood a lot and I made a commitment to use Clipper 5.01 as my primary development language in 1992.

It was not easy, I rewrote all of my routines in Clipper 5 but it was fun! I found my lucky star when I enrolled to an Assembly class in Teknokom, the instructor was a well-known Assembly guru and author in Indonesia, Mr. Suyanto EA. He taught me the foundation to program in Assembly. After completing the course, I add more power in my routines by interfacing Clipper 5 with Assembly. It was the starting of db-Pro Library for Clipper 5, with more than a hundred powerful routines I used when developing applications.

After that, I studied C and C++ by reading books and started to write a new library which make my development easier and faster than ever. It was called dTBx - dbMaster TBrowse Extension, which enabled me to create applications with standard features (searching, filtering, column-resizing, DBEVAL, and a lot more), thus I didn't have to think the column size, dTBx will handle it for me :)

After the slow development of Clipper (although Computer Associates gives the right of controlling design, development, testing, and marketing for Clipper to GrafXSoft on April 22, 2002), I have rethought and explored the possibilities for development in Windows-based and Internet-based application. I have bought books and tried Visual Objects, Visual Basic, Delphi, Xbase++, Access, PowerBuilder, SQLWindows, UltimADE, etc and I think Delphi is more appropriate for me, thus I personally committed to use Delphi as my primary Windows-based programming language.

In December 2005, I read a book that changed my opinion about Financial Planning. Since then, Financial Planning plays a very important role in my personal life. I began to read some books on Financial Planning (FP). I even made some presentation on the importance of FP to my friends. In my big family gathering on Chinese New Year, I also tried to highlight FP to the members of my big family. In short, I am trying to expose how important FP is, and trying to educate people on it. I plan to write more on FP in this website. Hopefully people can get benefits from it.

Long live Clipper, Delphi, and Financial Planning!!

Library of Books:
I have a strong passion on reading books. Almost everyday I read books, mostly before I go to sleep. Almost every month I buy books. That's why I put the list of my books online, so that I can recheck before buying a book which I am not sure whether I already have that book or not.

Honors and Activities: